by Lance T. Izumi, Fellow in California Studies
Pacific Research Institute
June 2, 1998

Announcer lead: Time for Perspectives. Time for Perspectives. Lance Izumi says that reducing class size may not improve student performance.

Before California voters can even recover from the June primary election, state officials are already crafting propositions for the November general election ballot. The most ambitious such initiative would permanently reduce class size in grades K through 3.

Class size reduction is popular. Parents, teachers and politicians love it. In the current fiscal year, $1.5 billion will be spent on class size reduction.

However, is reducing class size really an effective way to improve student performance? According to Prof. Eric Hanushek, perhaps the nation's top education economist, the answer is "no." In a recent study, Prof. Hanushek notes that existing evidence shows little, if any, correlation between reducing class size and increased student achievement.

For example, between 1950 and 1995, pupil-teacher ratios fell nationally by 35 percent. Yet test scores have not gone up. Even the Tennessee class-size-reduction experiment, which California officials cite to support their efforts, does not hold up under analysis. In Tennessee, reducing class size did help students in kindergarten, but didn't improve student performance from the first grade on up. Prof. Hanushek concludes that California's class-size-reduction program is "unlikely to have a beneficial effect on overall student achievement."

Rather than class size, what makes the biggest difference, says Prof. Hanushek, is teacher quality. While California's proposed class-size-reduction initiative includes a competency test for newly hired teachers, state officials didn't include a test for current teachers because they worried that too many veteran teachers would fail. Yet, an incompetent teacher is just as incompetent whether he or she is in front of a class of 20 or a class of 30.

Decreasing class size is easy. Increasing teacher competence, requiring students to meet rigorous standards, and giving parents more school choice, that's hard. But it's the hard alternatives that will produce the result we all want: greater student achievement.

With a perspective, I'm Lance Izumi.